Identity politics

And I worry because those turmoil events (black swan events, they’re called I think?) plus increasing economic inequality tend to be harbingers of societal turmoil and even collapse.

Yes. This is DH's thinking. He sees identity politics as bourgeois fiddling while the proverbial Rome burns.

Great idea for a thread.

I think both classical liberalism and traditional socialism have the ingredients for a response.

Classical liberalism has something along the lines of Rawls' "initial position", which is (paraphrasing and over-simplifying wildly) "Imagine yourself drawing up the rules for society. You know that people will be born into this society with differing degrees of innate talent and strength. You know that sometimes they'll be born to rich parents, and sometimes to poor parents. You know they'll be subject to plain, dumb luck - e.g. getting a chronic illness that leaves them unable to support their family. What rules do you put in place to ensure that everyone gets a reasonable chance of making a success of their lives, that people who've had the bad luck to be born poor, or born without a natural aptitude for the sort of mathematical ability that makes you big bucks in the finance industry, or who've contracted a serious illness, still have enough to live comfortable and dignified lives?" (Interestingly, a group of psychologists posed this problem to a group of registered Republican voters in the US, without telling them it was a "liberal" thought experiment - the voters designed a society that looked a bit like Sweden ).

The other tack is to go for traditional socialist "class analysis" and look, not at individuals (so avoiding the trap that identarians use, whereby Theresa May as PM and Sjhid Javid as home secretary become reasons to assume that women and members of ethnic minorities have no barriers to advancement, while underachieving white teenage boys in Sunderland become reasons to assume that white men have never had it so bad). It also includes a proper understanding of intersectionality* - understanding that groups of people suffer along different axes of intersection - so the problem for the white boys in Sunderland is that no matter how white they are, their social class shafts them (it's not that white males are suddenly being shafted when they weren't before, it's that social class boundaries still matter when they shouldn't).

*Intersectionality was never intended to be, and should not be coopted, to be used as a form of identarian top-trumps at an individual level. It was meant to be a tool within the concept of class analysis.

Epic crosspost.

Marking my place, this looks to be a very interesting thread 👍

It all starts with fighting prejudice in our own heads: moving away from "this person is X, and therefore does/thinks/should be Y." Instead we should recognise people, including ourselves, as individuals.

The problem is that prejudice is an innate part of our human mentality, a way of compensating for our inability to remember the individual details of more than 200 people in a world where we'll encounter far more than that in the course of a day. Prejudice is therefore really, really easy to fall into. The problem with identity politics and 'class based analysis' is that they provide 'justification' for intellectual laziness in the same way that racialist anatomical science provided a justification for racism. Worse, they feed into our worst instincts for tribalism and contempt for the other.

The only way to destroy these tendencies comes from within. You have to confront yourself when you find yourself making assumptions about people, or worse, justifying it.
"They are okay, but all other X's are totally Y".
"I don't hate Ys, but they are all mostly X, so I hate the Y class."
"How can I hate Ys? Wanting them to be X the way I want is only for their own good."

We have to fight these ideas in our own heads, and recognise that the people who feed on and speak these sort of attitudes are deliberately promoting hatred and prejudice for their own pleasure or power.

I'll repeat what I said on the other thread, just for starters...

The DH thinks that the financial collapse of 2008 was the beginning of the transition period during which the US is replaced by China as dominant power and the various convulsions - Trump, Brexit, the rise of identity, etc - are just symptoms of it.

He may well be right. But if he is, we need to be thinking about what we might look like afterwards. And a society based on individual identity doesn't look promising to me - it will just benefit all the privileged groups at the expense of everyone else because the privileged groups will be able to impose their identities and the marginalised groups won't. And this is a feminist issue because women will be further marginalised by the identities of males.

(NB: I don't see white, upper and middle class males who like to present feminine as in the least bit marginalised.)